Books by Kimberly Blaeser
Ancient Light, The University of Arizona Press January 2024
Elegiac and powerful, Ancient Light uses lyric, narrative, and concrete poems to give voice to some of the most pressing ecological and social issues of our time.
With vision and resilience, Kimberly Blaeser’s poetry layers together past, present, and futures. Against a backdrop of pandemic loss and injustice, MMIW (Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women), hidden graves at Native American boarding schools, and destructive environmental practices, Blaeser’s innovative poems trace pathways of kinship, healing, and renewal. They celebrate the solace of natural spaces through sense-laden geo-poetry and picto-poems. With an Anishinaabe sensibility, her words and images invoke an ancient belonging and voice the deep relatedness she experiences in her familiar watery regions of Minnesota.
The collection invites readers to see with a new intimacy the worlds they inhabit. Blaeser brings readers to the brink, immerses them in the darkest regions of the Anthropocene, in the dangerous fallacies of capitalism, and then seeds hope. Ultimately, as the poems enact survivance, they reclaim Indigenous stories and lifeways.
Copper Yearning, Holy Cow! Press 2019
Copper Yearning invests itself in a compassionate dual vision—bearing witness to the lush beauty of our intricately woven environments and to the historical and contemporary perils that threaten them. Kimberly Blaeser’s fourth collection of poetry deftly reflects her Indigenous perspective and a global awareness. Through vividly rendered images, the poems dwell among watery geographies, alive to each natural nuance, alive also to the uncanny. Set in fishing boats, in dreams, in prisons, in memory, or in far flung countries like Bahrain, the pieces sing of mythic truths and of the poignant everyday injustices. But, whether resisting threats to effigy mounds or inhabiting the otherness of river otter, ultimately they voice a universal longing for a place of balance, a way of being in the world—for the ineffable. Individually, the poems in this collection provide moments of search and epiphany, glimpses of destination; taken together they begin to form a map for traveling there.
Apprenticed to Justice, Salt Pub.
“The poems in Apprenticed to Justice are a sublime combination of literary indulgences echoing booted feet on still frozen ground, turtle rattles, a flushing of cranes, or antler dangles near ears. Sweet maple sap and hazelnut eyes. Gelatin tadpoles and bullrush psalms. These poems bring the snowblind tumbling into dimension. Northern lights and doppelgangers. Excrement and cleansing. They warm valleys with buttercups; recite names invoking reason. They shoot meaning into madness with the subtle elegance of Anishinaabe style. Kim Blaeser is a knock-out poet, bringing boxers to steal hearts, floured fists to punch dough, and a serious sense of familial White Earth beauty, hunger, and humility that’s impossible to put down. Voles scuttle where crooked knuckles clench our very souls. This is an impressive and accomplished collection of poetic delivery we can truly feast upon. A necessary full copper voice. A balance in the tilt of the world.”
– Allison Hedge Coke
“This is a gorgeous book. It’s musical and strange. I have already spent much time with Kim Blaeser’s new poems and I will keep reading them in the years to come.”
– Sherman Alexie”Blaeser shares… a unique vision that is at once personal and interwoven with the communal, the historical. There is humour here, as well as serious critique… This is a sure-handed work of impressive maturity and beauty.”
– Tracy Ryan
“Kimberly Blaeser… honors the complexity of identity, land and humanity.”
– Winona LaDuke
Traces in Blood, Bone, and Stone: Contemporary Ojibwe Poetry, (as Editor), Loonfeather Press: Minnesota.
“It might be said that western awareness of American Indian poetry began with the Ojibwe. When Henry Rowe Schoolcraft. . . published translations of Chippewa songs and stories in 1839, it woke the world to the existence of sophisticated literary and philosophical awareness among the “savages” of North America. It could be seen as the start of scholarly respect for what is now called ‘Native American Literature’. . .”With that background, the number, the strength, and the variety of the Ojibwe voices in this superb anthology should be a surprise to no one and a delight to every reader of poetry. I cannot think of any collection of American Indian poems — including those that represent many tribal nations — that gives a better picture of what it means to be an Indian today, of the many ways in which Native writers continue to bring the past into the present, celebrate the future, ot just survive, but thrive as a vital part of world literature.”
– Joe Brachac Abenaki writer and storyteller, author of Our Stories Remember
“In the Ojibwe story of the world’s creation a courageous animal brings to the earth’s suface a bit of mud to transform it into living space. From the Ojibwe nation come these poems of land taken, boarding schools, family and ancestors, of the small but meaningful graces of daily life. These poets, beginning and established, are transforming the deduction of colonization, building the written literature of the Ojibwe nation, one poem at a time, one voice at a time with honor, with love, with truth, and with powerful voices.”
– Laura Tohe, author of No Parole Today
“The earliest Native American writing is marked by a tribal-specificity that concerns itself with narrating geographically-specific lands and jurisdictions that give life to the communities at occupy them. The best of Ojibway poetry continues this keen sense of evoking concrete Anishinaabe lands and governments, wherever they may occur, and in all of the directions Anishinaabe people have found themselves located.”
– Craig Womack, author of Red on Red: Native American Literary Separatism
Absentee Indians and Other Poems
Michigan State University Press.
“These poems are small sure lights in the darkness—poems to lead us home. Kim Blaeser is exacting and precise. Her compassionate vision is the light.”
– Joy Harjo, author of Map to the Next World
“This collection has the capacity to carry us home like a luminous guide, reminding us of the wonder of our place on this good earth.”
– Gordon Henry, author of The Light People
“Absence may be a term sometimes assigned in a limited way to a lack of Indian presence, but not in Absentee Indians and Other Poems, which is the beauty and power of Blaeser’s poetry. I love it. I love it.”
– Simon Ortiz, author of Woven Stone and From Sand Creek
“Each poem in this wonderful collection is like a road well worth taking. . . and then taking again.”
– Joseph Bruchac, author of Bowman’s Store
“Kimberly Blaeser shows an uncommon warmth and deep, lyrical beauty in her visions. This is a remarkably moving collection of poems.”
– Adrian C. Louis, author of Ancient Acid Flashes Back
Stories Migrating Home: A Collection of Anishnaabe Prose, (as Editor), Loonfeather Press: Minnesota.
Featuring the work of 30 contemporary Ojibway writers including Louise Erdrich, Gerald Vizenor, Gordon Henry, Denise Sweet, Armand Ruffo, Kateri Damm and Jim Northrup.
“Imagine a raging and inviting fire surrounded by voices — mouths shouting, lips whispering, tongues chanting — from the sublime to the most coarse, each of them speaking a certain truth from their Anishinaabe hearts and minds. In Stories Migrating Home Kimberly Blaeser has assembled a dynamic collection. Erdrich, Northrup, Treuer, Henry and many wonderful others are a shining inspiration for all of us. There is no better reason to celebrate than when we get to tell our own stories — and when those who do not know us get to hear the singing.”
– Mark Turcotte (Turtle Mountain Chippewa) author of The Feathered Heart
“This varied collection includes retold myths, an account of writings by Ojibwe students at Hampton Institute, stories and drama. In Stories Migrating Home the authors vividly capture the pain, joy and humor of Ojibwe life both off and on the reservation. They also celebrate the Anishinaabe commitment to tradition, community and family that both strengthens their people and calls them home. One of the delights of the volume is reading the carefully crafted selections by writers who are very talented but less well known. This is a welcome addition to the increasing number of anthologies of regional and tribal writing by Native Americans.”
– A. Lavonne Brown Ruoff, Professor Emerita of English, University of Illinois at Chicago
“Like the stories in Stories Migrating Home, the Anishinaabe are always there, always home. From the Great Lakes region northward into Canada and southward into the U.S. — in fact, before those nations ever existed — the Anishinaabe were there. But like other native peoples everywhere, always in constant motion — in boarding schools and urban areas, even Paris, even California, even Washington, D.C. These stories are an assertion of their realtiy, identity and indigenous voice. And with their stories’ great love, compassion and humor, these Anishinaabe writers and storytellers invite readers and listeners home to join them there.”
– Simon J. Ortiz, author of After and Before the Lightning
Trailing You: Poems, Greenfield Review Press.
A short review of Trailing You by D.L. Birchfield
“The steady rhythm of her voice. the pow-wow ring of her imagery. The drum of her heartbeat. In this first collection of her poems, Blaeser shars her mixed-blood world and adds her rich voice to contemporary Indian women’s stories. Who says that poetry is difficult? She asks, and takes us places where poems live. I enjoyed the trip.”- Diane Glancy”Trailing You . . . a new collection of poetry to be read on a starry winter night in the old way when the lodge fire is high and wolves sing on the hill. Persuasive, language/image of memory rich in narrative; a lush valuable sheaf of pure poems by what surely is destined to become an influential voice in American Literature: Kimberly Blaeser. . . who discovered sanity in the rhythmic sounds of words, the opulence of the heart, the circle of love and remembrance and in her ancestors’ values of tradition and song.”
– Maurice Kenny
“I’ve read the manuscript and I found it to be stunning. Her poems weave tribal dreams and everyday experience, intimacy and anger, with astonishing beauty and force. These poems stay with us long after we put the book down, their exact beauty and honesty a rare gift, a rare voice.”
– Louis Owens
“Kimberly Blaeser celebrates the voices of natural memories. She would grow a beard and praise the humors of the seasons to hear a poem on the border of dreams. She dreams of winters that come to hear tribal stories, the hurried reach for “teeth behind the water pail,” and she laughs “out loud at the madness” of the moment. She is loved in these poems, and the voices are a gift that leaves the page so close to shore.”
– Gerald Vizenor
Books Containing Interviews with Autobiographical Essays by Kim
Here First, Arnold Krupat (Editor), Brian Swann (Editor), Random House (Available Now!)
Women of White Earth, Vance Vannote, Univ. Minnesota Press.
As We Are Now : Mixblood Essays on Race and Identity, W. S. Penn (Editor),University California Press. (Hardcover)